Three studies examined preschoolers' judgments of moral and personal rules. Children were interviewed about punishment, the relative importance of various rule violations, and authority. Children reported that moral transgressions were more wrong than personal rule violations and that moral rule violators deserved greater punishment than did…

Children's moral judgments, attributions of emotion, and their associations were examined in hypothetical, prototypical situations and situations of provocation and peer retaliation. Children judged prototypical and provoked moral transgressions (hitting and teasing). Hypothetical moral transgressions were judged to be more serious and deserving…

The methodology for obtaining immanent justice responses was evaluated by means of a replication of Piaget's immanent justice study. Kindergartners and first, third, and fifth graders were presented with four vignettes that allowed for immanent justice responses. Children's responses indicated developmental trends from immature toward mature…

Two studies, involving elementary school children, investigated children's representation of adults' use of the moral intentionality principle, with particular emphasis on the distinction between causal attributions of events-to-the-situation vs. events-to-the-person. (JS)

Investigated sex differences in moral thinking and the relationship between sex roles and moral judgment across the adult lifespan. A total of 60 subjects participated: 10 women and 10 men in each of three age groups (18-24, 30-50, 60-75). A multiple measures approach to data collection was employed. (RH)

Discusses problems in Pratt, Golding, and Hunter's investigation (in this issue) of two propositions central to Gilligan's (1982) thesis on the mismeasurement of women's moral orientation and development. Describes research addressing the problems and indicates directions for further research. (RH)

Assessed the moral judgments of 543 subjects, ages 9 to 81 years, to evaluate Gilligan's (1982; Brown, Tappan, and Gilligan 1995) claims that Kohlberg's moral judgment stage is biased against females. Found no support for Gilligan's claim of stage bias, but some support for claim of gender-related moral-oriented differences. (HTH)

The influence of anger on mothers' judgments of children and socialization was examined in a 5-week study of 48 mothers of 6- to 8-year-old children. Findings provided evidence that angry mothers expect their children to act more negatively, thereby supporting the proposal that anger may negatively bias parents' reactions. (SH)

Challenges Carol Gilligan's (1982) assertion that there are two fundamentally different and gender-related orientations to morality, namely a male justice orientation and a female care orientation. Argues that Gilligan's view that these orientations are logically and psychologically incompatible and that their developmental origins are in early…

A study of 77 sixth-graders indicated that sociomoral reasoning correlated with both socialized and unsocialized aggressive behaviors, but not with attention problems, anxiety-withdrawal, or motor tension without aggression. A relationship between maturity of sociomoral reasoning and self-reported antisocial behavior was found among boys only. (RH)

Investigated moral judgment delay in adolescent delinquents based on sex differences and specific moral value areas. Found that delinquents of both sexes were, on average, developmentally delayed in moral judgment, particularly on values related to the law. However, they rated values such as promise keeping, helping others, and saving life as…

Examined the variability in the development of moral judgment by reanalyzing a set of Kohlberg's data studies on the concept of structured wholeness, a deep cognitive organization unifying different surface judgments given by the same subject. Although the results failed to show total consistency they also show that it is not meaningful to claim…

Study 1 involved a standard interview of first- and third-graders, who consistently rated hypothetical conventional infractions as affectively neutral but tended to regard moral transgressions as affectively negative. Study 2 experimentally manipulated affect prior to a controlled recall task involving moral and conventional stories. (Author/KS)

Reviews Kohlberg's research on moral development and criticizes standard issue scoring, a measure of individual developmental stages of moral judgment. Discusses problems with the Moral Judgment Interview's content and scoring, suggesting longitudinal, comparative, and gender-related research needed to resolve problems of validity and reliability.…

Investigated 48 fifth- and eighth-grade boys' moral judgments of stories featuring good intentions with bad outcomes. Clear differences in moral judgments were found between groups recruited from the same general social setting that were comparable in intelligence but different in moral and social behavior. (RJC)